The Natural

The poetry and madness of John Clare.

In early 1860, a poetry fan from London called James Hipkins wrote to Dr. Wing, the superintendent of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, inquiring after the welfare of one of the inmates, the nature poet John Clare. The sixty-six-year-old poet’s reply is one of the last things he wrote:

March 8th 1860

Dear Sir

I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are you must excuse me for I have nothing to commu[n]icate or tell of & why I am shutup I dont know I have nothing to say so I conclude

yours respectfully

John Clare

Clare had been in the asylum for eighteen years, having previously spent four years in a private asylum in Essex. He had not once seen his wife in that time; three of his seven surviving children had died; his work had fallen into neglect, and his reputation, such as it was, focussed on his status as a peasant and as a lunatic. Jonathan Bate, in his biography, “John Clare” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $40), says of the Hipkins letter that “this is a voice not of madness but of quiet despair.” I’m not sure that he’s right—not caring whom you’re writing to or why you’re in a madhouse would be despair; not knowing is surely closer to insanity—but a reader can feel, and like, Bate’s empathy with Clare, his willingness to imagine the texture of his plight. Bate is an energetic English-literature professor at Warwick University, whose unacademic desire to write from the heart has been apparent in a study, “The Genius of Shakespeare”; a novel, “The Cure for Love”; and a passionate account of ecological themes in literature, “The Song of the Earth.” Clare, in Bate’s view, is “the one major English poet never to have received a biography that is worthy of his memory,” and this fine and fair-minded book sets out to remedy the gap.

The great curse of Clare’s life was poverty. He is the poorest major writer in the canon of English literature, so poor that he was often unable to afford paper. These struggles are reflected in some of his manuscripts: he made his own paper, if it can be called that, by scraping layers of birch bark, and his own ink by “a mix of bruised nut galls, green copper, and stone blue soaked in a pint and a half of rain-water”—and he was doing this after the supposed breakthrough success of his first book, “Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery,” in 1820. Some of his manuscripts are made from letter covers stitched together; one of his best nature poems is written on the back of a handbill for a local election in which Clare could not vote, because the poor were excluded from the franchise.

We perhaps talk too easily about “struggling artists”; but there is no denying that Clare’s struggles with poverty were all-encompassing and lifelong. He was born in 1793, the son of Parker Clare, who was a casual farm laborer in Northamptonshire, a pretty but unspectacular patch of countryside in the Midlands. The family’s key asset was an apple tree outside their cottage which produced enough fruit to support them when Parker’s rheumatism prohibited steady work. In the intervals between helping his father in the fields, John, from the age of five to the age of eleven, went to the village school, and acquired a passion for reading which sparked, in his early teens, the desire to become a poet—an extraordinarily unlikely thing for an early-nineteenth-century English peasant to think he could manage to be.

As the son of a peasant, Clare was born to a life of manual labor. It may be that nobody is entirely suited to a life of manual labor, but, if there are degrees of unsuitedness, John Clare would rank high. Stunted by malnutrition, he was small—five feet—accident-prone, and sickly; an early employer described him as “weak but willing.” In his youth, he was put to work weeding and haymaking and stacking bales. He also worked for a pub landlord, plowing and looking after animals; as an apprentice gardener at the local mansion; as a militiaman (his company was known as the “Bum-Tools”); with fencing and hedging gangs; on a plantation; scouring out fish ponds; and in a lime works. He saw at first hand the transforming process of enclosure, in which common lands were taken over by rich landowners, and was appalled by its “lawless law.” And all this time his mind was racing, burning, with poetry:

I could not stop my thoughts and often failed to keep them till night, so when I fancied I had hit upon a good image or natural description I used to sneak into a corner of the garden and clap it down, but the appearance of my employers often put my fancies to flight and made me lose the thought and the muse together, for I have always felt anxious to conceal my scribbling and would as leave have confessed to be a robber as a rhymer.

No one else wrote in circumstances like these, and no one else, uncoincidentally, wrote like John Clare. Among the other Romantics, Wordsworth is a master at reflecting on nature, Coleridge an inspired thief of images from the natural world, and Keats a great sensualist of natural perceptions. But nobody knew nature as well as Clare, or put so much of it into poetry. Clare resisted turning nature into metaphor, or into a mask of the transcendent, and he was at his best saying something that the other Romantics never wanted to say: it is what it is. There are surges of emotion in his nature poetry—as Bate points out, one of his favorite phrases is “I love”—but their movement is consistently away from fantasy, back to the thing itself. At the same time, there is something desperately intense about the way Clare clings to details, anchoring himself in the particular. His poetry eludes short quotation—there is no single phrase of Clare’s to rival, say, Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” His effects are quiet and accumulative, and his poems are most effective when taken in full, as with “Emmonsails Heath in Winter”:

I love to see the old heath’s withered brake

Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling

While the old heron from the lonely lake

Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing

And oddling crow in idle motions swing

On the half-rotten ash tree’s topmost twig

Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed—

Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig

Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;

The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn

And for the ’awe round fields and closen rove

And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove

Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain

And hang on little twigs and start again.

“ ’Awe” is the Northamptonshire dialect term for hawthorn berry, “closen” are small fields or enclosures, and “bumbarrel,” wonderfully, is the long-tailed tit. This poem is so fluid and apparently casual that we are almost surprised to realize that it is a sonnet. It doesn’t go anywhere, and yet it does, and that is one of the most modern things about Clare. His poetry has its obvious affinities with modern masters such as Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams, but its in-the-momentness, its willingness to wander about and see what happens and arrive back where it started, also establishes a link with the cool school of modern flaneurs like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Don’t just take my word for it: Ashbery himself, in a superb essay about the poet, has said that “the effect of Clare’s poetry, on me at least, is always the same—that of re-inserting me in my present, of re-establishing ‘now.’ ”

The fact that Clare’s virtues are things that we recognize and like in some contemporary poetry was not, however, an automatic recipe for success in his own time. Even Keats, another great working-class English poet of the day, thought that “the Description too much prevailed over the Sentiment.” When Clare began to be taken up by editors and patrons, he was valued first and foremost as a freak: the title page of his first book described him as “A Northamptonshire Peasant.” The editor’s introduction called him “the least favoured by circumstances, and the most destitute of friends, of any [poet] that ever existed.” This freak value was important, and so was the conventional, sententious side of Clare, apparent in works such as “An Effusion to Poesy on receiving a Damp from a genteel Opinionist in Poetry, of some sway, as I am told, in the Literary World.” Readers and the London literary world loved it, and Clare was briefly all the rage, making a vivid impression on men like his first editor, Edward Drury:

Clare cannot reason; he writes and can give no reason for his using a fine expression, or a beautiful idea: if you read Poetry to him, he’ll exclaim at each delicate expression “beautiful! fine!” but can give no reason: yet is always correct and just in his remarks. He is low in stature—long visage—light hair—coarse features—ungaitly—awkward—is a fiddler—loves ale—likes the girls—somewhat idle,—hates work.

Clare almost met Keats, who shared the same publisher; he met William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. Local bigwigs chipped in to buy him an annuity; Prince Leopold, son-in-law of the Regent, subscribed to his next volume. He began to get fan mail—a mixed blessing at a time when the recipient of a letter was expected to pay the postage. A week after he returned from the dizzy celebration of publication in London, Clare married Patty Turner, an illiterate local girl; their first child, Anna, was born in June, less than three months after the wedding.

But Clare was the kind of person who, even when he gets a break, can’t get a break. It was partly to do with the type of poetry he wrote, which grew less popular as it grew less easily moralistic and less familiar to its readership; and it was partly to do with a sharp decline in the audience for poetry. In late 1825, there was a bank crash, which led to a recession the following year (the Great Panic, as it was called), which led to a sharp downturn in publishing in general, and poetry publishing in particular. There was also a sense that the key cultural moment of the Romantic movement was over. Wordsworth and Coleridge were both past their best; Keats (whose last book sold five hundred copies) died in 1821, Byron in 1824—Clare saw the funeral procession, with Byron’s coffin being followed by the empty carriages of aristocrats who were avoiding their scandalous fellow-peer even in death. If Clare had been born twenty years earlier, in time for the Byron boom, his career might have been different. As it was, each of his books—“Poems, Descriptive” was followed by “The Village Minstrel” (1821), “The Shepherd’s Calendar” (1827), and “The Rural Muse” (1835)—was better than the preceding, and each one sold fewer copies. The poetry public, such as it was, preferred lavishly produced Christmas anthologies to actual books by poets. In 1825, Clare submitted poems to two such anthologies, was extensively rewritten, and wrote to a friend that “as to the Poetical Almanacks, they may all go to Hell next year.” But he kept submitting poems to the annuals, because he couldn’t afford not to. It comes as a jolt to find that in the summer of 1826, at the age of thirty-three and some years after what should have been his life-changing success, Clare was still having to go out into the fields and undertake manual labor to support his family.

The publication of his books meant that Clare wasn’t just an agricultural laborer anymore, but he also wasn’t a writer, or, if he was, he was one who lived in a peasant cottage, in a peasant village, surrounded by peasants, and who was expected when times were hard to do the same work as them:

I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to every thing but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.

This sounds bleak, but it also sounds true—and this was before Clare’s poems became less popular and the smart set dropped him, with the result that he was left even more between worlds. “I had a variety of minds about me and all of them unsettled,” he said once, and the remark goes deep. It was increasingly hard for him to know who he was or where he belonged, and he gradually came to feel that he did not belong anywhere. His behavior became more and more erratic; he began to see “blue devils” and to suffer from vivid delusions. “He showed aberrations of intellect by variety of fancies,” the local vicar reported. “Among the most prominent was that of appearing to see spirits of a hideous description moving about in the ceiling of the room.” There was a scandal when he disrupted a performance of “The Merchant of Venice” by shouting abuse at Shylock. Clare had for some time had long depressive spells, alternating with manic episodes, a pattern that today would be seen as classically bipolar. He became harder for his wife, Patty, to cope with. Eventually, on July 8, 1837, his doctors signed a certificate of insanity, and he was taken to Dr. Allen’s asylum, in Essex. He went into the asylum around the time of his forty-fourth birthday.

Bate’s account of Clare’s madness shows his book at its humane best. “Posthumous psychiatric diagnosis is a dubious activity,” he warns, before adding, “Madness is of an age, not for all time. It is experienced and witnessed in history.” Bate convincingly argues against schizophrenia—often cited as the source of Clare’s illness—as the cause, and discusses instead the possible roles of bipolar affective disorder, diet, malaria, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress, and sexually transmitted disease, before concluding that “his condition is better described as a ‘nervous breakdown’ than an eruption of ‘lunacy.’ ” This seems right. Clare’s mind broke, and he lost his grip on who he was. In the asylum, a key theme of his delusions was that he was somebody else. Byron was his favorite alternative identity—the super-confident poet-peer, who never doubted who he was for a moment. Clare wrote some mock-Byronic poems, either believing that he was the peer or trying to impersonate him, or a bit of both. In some moods, Clare thought that he was a prizefighter; in others, that he had written Shakespeare’s plays. He thought that he was Nelson, or Wellington, or a son of George III. He lost himself. After seeing Queen Victoria on a rural tour in 1844, he told the asylum keeper that he had spoken to her. She had said, “I’m John Clare.”

Today, we take our right to invent ourselves more or less for granted. Clare could not and did not. His poetry was an effort of self-invention. Its crystalline focus on specifics was a way for him to fix himself in place against the centrifugal pressures of his imagination. For him the issue was: if you begin making yourself up, where do you stop, and how do you come back to being the person you used to be—how do you come back to yourself?

I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host

Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes—

And yet I am and love—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise

Into the living sea of waking dreams

Where there is neither sense of life or joys

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I love the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

These desolate lines are from “I Am,” one of the great poems Clare wrote in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, the second asylum to which he was committed. In July, 1841, he had escaped from Dr. Allen’s asylum and walked the hundred-odd miles home, so hungry on the journey that he ate grass. When he arrived, he was devastated not to find his first love, Mary Joyce, and their (imaginary) children there: he had convinced himself that he was married to her as well as to Patty. Clare’s stay at home lasted five months, before he was committed again, this time to the public asylum in Northampton, “much the grandest building Clare ever lived in,” as Bate notes. Some of his best poetry dates from the early years in the asylum—poetry about whose existence his contemporaries had no idea. He remained there for the rest of his life, with the flow of poems and letters gradually dwindling, and lived in total obscurity until his death, from a stroke, in 1864, at the age of seventy.

Poets need luck in life, and they need it in death, too, if their work is to find readers. Clare wrote about thirty-five hundred poems, of which about four hundred were published in his lifetime. The ideal thing would have been for these poems to be discovered, edited, and published, to great acclaim, making Clare’s place in the pantheon secure. However, a quickie biography by Frederick Martin, in 1865, had the inevitable effect of focussing attention more on the life than on the work; a “Life and Remains of John Clare,” in 1873, broke the news that Clare had continued writing in the asylum, but received patronizing reviews. For the next ninety years, Clare’s manuscripts sat in the Northampton library and the Peterborough Museum. Then, in 1963, an expat British scholar, Eric Robinson, began a decades-long project of editing and publishing Clare’s work in the multivolume scholarly edition the poet so clearly deserved. The ninth and final volume came out in the United States from Oxford University Press in April of this year.

The appearance of this magisterial edition should have been a happy ending. Robinson, however, did not only edit Clare; in 1965, he bought the copyright of his unpublished work—i.e., most of his work—for the regal sum of one pound. This means that, in theory, nobody can publish Clare’s previously unpublished work without Robinson’s permission, effectively giving him a stranglehold over all Clare studies. But does he really control the copyright? The basis of his claim is that he bought the rights from the publishing company J. Whitaker & Sons Ltd., which had, in turn, bought the rights from Clare’s widow and family, in 1864. Copyright law is never simple, and this claim—resting on a legal document between Joseph Whitaker and the Clares which was not discovered until 1932 and was destroyed by a German bomb in 1940—is the subject of some debate. In fact, jaded fans of “W.W.E. Smackdown!” who long to see some real fighting could do worse than turn their attention to the field of Clare studies. A 2000 letter in the Times Literary Supplement, signed by twenty-eight poets and Clare scholars, among them the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, called the copyright claim “little short of scandalous” and urged the academic world to “resist the suppression of competing editions.” The letter was prompted by the news that Robinson had threatened legal action against a young Clare scholar who had brought out an edition without his permission. Jonathan Bate treads carefully in the introduction to his new edition of Clare’s poetry, “ ‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare,” expressing gratitude to Robinson without exactly deferring to his claim to own the copyrights. So does he or doesn’t he? The definitive legal answer seems to be “Dunno.”

The issue is a real one for readers because the question of editing Clare is impossible to dodge. His manuscripts were violently chaotic: his handwriting was hard to read, his spelling was terrible, his grammar was poor, and the poems were liberally flecked with always obscure and now extinct terms in Northamptonshire dialect. While he was alive, his editors cleaned up his spelling and grammar, and often went so far as to rewrite the poems. Eric Robinson, in his scholarly edition, chose to “un-edit” Clare, and present his manuscripts as he wrote them, in as raw a state as possible. The result is indubitably authentic but also at times difficult to read, and it certainly isn’t inviting for readers unfamiliar with Clare. Here, for instance, is a stanza from the official, Robinson-edited manuscript version of a poem unpublished in Clare’s lifetime and later titled “The Lament of Swordy Well.” This is the elegiac, political Clare, his identification with the land at its most nearly complete:

I own Im poor like many more

But then the poor mun live

And many came for miles before

For what I had to give

But since I fell upon the town

They pass me with a sigh

Ive scarce the room to say sit down

And so they wander bye

Not every line of Robinson’s nine-volume edition of Clare’s poetry is like that, but a lot of it is. There is something magnificent about such fidelity to what Clare actually wrote, and the briefest glimpse of the manuscripts explains why the project took forty years to complete. This is Clare at his uncompromising Clare-est. The question is, What would Clare have wanted? In some moods, he was dismissive of grammar—“I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc”—but he was also grateful to his editors, and keen not to appear illiterate, or to present unnecessary obstacles to being read.

Jonathan Bate’s edition of the poems takes a sensible middle route, cleaning up the spelling and punctuation but not changing the words Clare wrote, to give as much authenticity as possible while reaching out to new readers. He is surely right when he says that “Im” has little to be said for it as a variant of “I’m”; it isn’t a funky, Emily Dickinson-type piece of idiosyncratic orthography—it’s a simple mistake. Punctuating those lines and tidying them up, and doing the same to the thousands of other similar lines of Clare, would surely do no harm; or would it? Bate’s accessible edition of the poems, aimed at the biggest possible readership, is a long-overdue break for Clare. But there is an ironic twist to this, since a Clare who had been able to spell and punctuate, and supervise his own publications so that we had a satisfactory final text, would have been a Clare who had a level of educational and economic support that the real-life poet never enjoyed. He would have had every opportunity to feel confident about who he was, and he would in that defining respect not have been the real John Clare. Clare felt so deeply that he did not have a completely fixed and stable identity that it is perhaps appropriate that we will never have a completely fixed and stable text of his poems. In fact, even such a familiar lyric set piece as “The Moors” simply doesn’t exist in the manuscripts as a singular entity, but evolved out of a passage in a longer, messier work. The poem, as it was first published, had been cut up, spliced together, and made into something that it wasn’t, quite. Clare’s poetry gets away from us, as he both longed and dreaded to get away from himself. It is as if he had achieved in his afterlife the sense of escape that eluded him in life, the condition he imagined in the third and final stanza of “I Am”:

I long for scenes where man hath never trod,

A place where woman never smiled or wept,

There to abide with my creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,

The grass below—above, the vaulted sky. ♦

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